Case IH, Australia New Zealand product manager planting and soil management equipment, Andrew Kissel said ClearVU met a need for an overall package that worked across different machinery brands.

“It is a cloud based data management product for customers of all brand colours,” he said.

“When you have the ability to interact with everything, it gives you a truer picture of what is happening.

“Headers, pickers, sprayers and seeding gear, all those products have a cost associated with them and a potential return on investment.

“When you look at precision farming as an industry there is a tremendous amount of information.”

Mr Kissel said ClearVU allowed farmers to harvest the information such as machinery performance, crop data and input costs and use it to inform decision making.

“ClearVU is a way for farmers to store a huge variety of information in one place, and at the touch of a button, they can combine to get a clear picture of the current state of the business, the impact of past decisions and where future opportunities lie,” he said.

“If you are just getting started in data, you’ve been collecting it for years and have it stored in a drawer, this is a cloud based tool for you to visualise that information.

“If you have been doing that and managing your information, but have had a hard time taking the next step, this is a cleaner more streamlined way to do that.

“For those that are really proactive this tool can be per hectare profit and loss map and everything in between.”

Machinery integration

Mr Kissel said a feature that set the product apart was the true integration with machinery data.

“You can track fuel levels, send guidance lines, prescriptions and offsets directly to machines from the map screen view machine metrics, and track alerts and service issues,” he said.

“ClearVU gives farmers the edge in successfully maintaining their farm and machinery data in a way that’s easy to navigate, visually appealing and incredibly simple to master.”

Cloud files

Mr Kissel said the product was differentiated from competitors such as Farm Works, by being cloud based and integrated with other systems telematics.

“There are a couple of options for getting the data to the cloud, for some customers it is simply pulling the USB out at the end of the day and plugging it into the computer to be sent off and be processed,” he said.

“However, if you are using a telematics solution, like AFS Connect or JD Link, you will be able to transfer the data from the machine to the cloud, into ClearVu and back.”

Mr Kissel said output data came in two file types, the Case IH proprietary CN1, for use with their own machines functionality and the more open ISOBUS XML.

“The CN1 is proprietary and can’t be unpacked because there is sensitive information,” he said.

Data ownership

Mr Kissel said looking more generally at the future of data use and ownership, particularly looking at future autonomy, he believed some data needed to be open and some needed to remain proprietary.

“From an agronomic side of things, yield, spray rates, fuel consumption and all productivity data is the customers,” he said.

“Anything with controlling features, such as throttle and transmission positions, there is too much risk there to make that stuff accessible over the cloud.”

Mr Kissel said the partnership with AgDNA meant there was a lot of infrastructure and knowledge behind the product.

“This is something too important to get wrong,” he said.

“We found a company that was doing it better then anyone, we added Case IH specific features and are distributing it though our dealerships is Australia and New Zealand.

“This product has been a number of years in the making, including a rigorous round of field testing by stakeholders who understand what farmers need to maximise their business’ productivity.”

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